proceedings of the american mathematical society Volume 123, Number 9, September 1995 POLYNOMIAL HARMONIC MORPHISMS BETWEEN EUCLIDEAN SPHERES JAMES EELLS AND PAUL YIU (Communicated by Peter Li) Abstract. A characterization is given of the harmonic morphisms between eu- clidean spheres whose component functions are harmonic homogeneous polyno- mials of the same degree, and also of polynomial harmonic morphisms between euclidean spaces which map spheres into spheres. These turn out to be isometric to the classical Hopf fibrations. 1. Introduction A harmonic morphism is a map <p'■ (-W> g) -> (A, h) between riemannian manifolds that preserves germs of harmonic functions: for each function / which is harmonic on an open set V Ç N, the composite / o <f>is a harmonic function on <p~l(V). See, for example, [ELI, (4.12)]. Fuglede [F] and Ishihara [I] have shown that <¡>: (M, g) —>(N, h) is a harmonie morphism if and only if it is harmonic and horizontally conformai. This latter property means that on the horizontal part of each tangent space, i.e., the orthogonal complement of ker(d(j)x) Q TXM, the differential restricts to a similarity. In other words, there is a dilation function p : M —►R+ such that (1) \\d<t>x(u)\\h= p(x)\\u\\g for every u £ (kerd^)-1. In this note, we prove the following theorems. Theorem 1. Let m > n, and let <j>: Sm —►S" be a map whose component functions are all harmonic homogeneous polynomials of the same degree k. The map <j)is a harmonic morphism if and only if it is isometric to one of the classical Hopf fibrations S3 - S2, S1 -» SA, or S15 -» S8. Theorem 2. Let m > n, and let <f>:Sm -> S" be the restriction of a homogeneous polynomial harmonic morphism O : Rm+1 -> R"+1. Then 4> is isometric to one of the classical Hopf fibrations. Received by the editors February 14, 1994. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 58E20; Secondary 55R25. Key words and phrases. Harmonic morphisms, Hopf fibrations, orthogonal multiplications, poly- nomial maps between spheres. The second author was partially supported by NSF Grant DMS-9201204. © 1995 American Mathematical Society 2921 License or copyright restrictions may apply to redistribution; see https://www.ams.org/journal-terms-of-use 2922 JAMES EELLSAND PAUL YIU 2. Orthogonal multiplications Baird [Bl, Theorem 7.2.7] has shown that an orthogonal multiplication / : Rr x Rs —>R" , i.e., a bilinear map satisfying (2) ll/(*,y)ll= IMII|y||, x£Rr,y£Rs, is a harmonic morphism if and only ifr = s = « = l,2,4or8. Given an orthogonal multiplication / as in (1), there is a homogeneous quadratic map F : Sr+S~l -» Sn , called the Hopf construction of /, defined by (3) F(x, y) = (||x||2 - ||y||2, 2/(x, y)), x £ Rr, y £ Rs, ||x||2 + ||y||2 = 1. If r = s, then F : S2r~l —*S" is always a harmonic map. Gigante [EL3, (10.5)] has shown that F is a harmonic morphism if and only if r —s — n — 1,2,4 or 8. The standard multiplications in the real division algebras R, C, H and O give orthogonal multiplications / : R" x R" -► 1" for « = 1,2,4,8. Hopfs construction on these / yields the classical Hopf fibrations 52"-1 —►S" referred to in the statements of Theorems 1 and 2. There are many orthogonal multiplications in those dimensions. Indeed, from [KR]1 (a) those / with 2-sided unit are isometrically isomorphic to the multiplica- tion in R, C, H and O according to a classical theorem of Hurwitz; (b) with any orthogonal multiplication /:i"xE"-.l" and any a £ S"~l we can associate an orthogonal multiplication fa with a 2-sided unit, via the following construction: Define the isometries *(x) = f(f(a,a),x), p(x) = f(x, f(a, a)), and let fa(x,y) = f(p-\x),X-\y)), e = f(f(a,a),f(a,a)). Then, p~l(e) = f(a, a) = X~l(e), and routine calculations reveal that fa : R" x R" —»R" is an orthogonal multiplication with 2-sided unit e . In conjunction with the following proposition, that solves Problem (4.7) of [EL2]. Proposition 3. A homogeneous quadratic map cj>: Sm -* S" is a harmonic morphism if and only if it is isometric to one of the classical Hopf fibrations S2"-i -^S" for n = 1,2, 4,8. That was established by the second author [Y, Remark following Proposition 4.3]; its proof is elaborated in that of Theorem 1 below. 3. Proof of Theorem 1 The classical Hopf fibrations are all harmonic morphisms: each of them is harmonic and horizontally conformai with a constant dilation function p(x) — 2 satisfying (1). Conversely, let </): Sm —>S" be a harmonic morphism with component functions harmonic homogeneous polynomials of degree k . These restrict to eigenfunctions of the Laplacian A5"" with eigenvalue k(k + m - 1) 'The first author is indebted to Dr. A. Sudbery for the reference [KR], and for related instruction. License or copyright restrictions may apply to redistribution; see https://www.ams.org/journal-terms-of-use POLYNOMIALHARMONIC MORPHISMS BETWEEN SPHERES 2923 ([ER, Corollary VIII. 1.4]). It follows that 0 is indeed an eigenmap with con- stant energy density function (4) e(4>)= ^WdcPW2= l-k(k + m - I). Note that ||<70x||2= J2U \\d<l>x(u)\\2with summation over an orthonormal ba- sis of Tx(Sm). Let p : Sm —>R+ denote the dilation function of the harmonic morphism <f>.From (4) above we infer that <j>cannot have vanishing differen- tial at any point of Sm . In other words, the dilation function p is nowhere zero. Thus, for each x £ Sm , the differential d(f>xhas full rank « , and satisfies \\d<px\\2= n.p{x)2. It follows that the dilation function p is constant: ... , lk(k + m- I) (5) ^) = y-—-—- Since a harmonic morphism is an open mapping, <fi: Sm —*S" must be surjective. Also, since dcf)x are all surjective, 0 is a submersion, and therefore a locally trivial fibration. By Browder's theorem [Br], (6) (m,«) = (3,2),(7,4),(15,8), the dimensions of the classical Hopf fibrations. Indeed, Hsu [H] has shown that each <f>~l(x)is a compact, connected manifold in Sm . Following Hsu, by tracing a horizontal geodesic joining a point x £ Sm to its antipode -x, we see that p is a positive even integer. For r > 0, denote by Bx(r) the open «-ball consisting of all points on Sm at a distance < r from x, traced out along horizontal tangential directions. Note that Bx(j¡) is mapped diffeomorphically onto S" - {-x}. Note also that for each / = 0, 1, ... , [^], </>sends the (n — 1)-sphere dBx(^ +^n) to the point -<f>(x). Since each of these spheres is both open and closed (the latter by the invariance of domain) in the compact connected manifold M = 4>~x(-<p(x)), there can be only one of them. From this, we conclude that p = 2, and k = 2 from (5). The components of the map 4> are homogeneous quadratic polynomials. In [Y], it was shown that if <p: Sm —►Sn is a homogeneous quadratic map, then, for every point q £ Sn in the image of <f>,the inverse image 4>~x(q) is a great sphere cut out by a linear subspace (f, c Iffl+I , the dimension of Wq being m + 1 - rank d(f>v for any v £ cj>~x(q). By Proposition 3.2 of [Y], the homogeneous quadratic map 4> is the Hopf construction of some orthogonal multiplication / : Rr x Rs —►R" if and only if there exists a pair of antipodal points ±q £ Sn such that dim Wq+ dim W-q —m + 1. Here, r = dim Wq and s —dim W_q . In the present case, this is clearly satisfied since each pair of antipodal points ±q £ Sn satisfies dim Wq= dim W_q = m - n + 1 = -=(m + 1) License or copyright restrictions may apply to redistribution; see https://www.ams.org/journal-terms-of-use 2924 JAMES EELLS AND PAUL YIU for (m, n) given in (6). We conclude, therefore, that the harmonic morphism <(>: S2"~l —>S" is indeed the Hopf construction of an orthogonal multiplication R" x R" —►R" . As such, it is isometric to the classical Hopf fibration. 4. Proof of Theorem 2 Baird ([Bl, §8.1], with correction in [B2, §4]) has shown that if <P: Rm+1-* R"+1 is a nonconstant A:-homogeneous polynomial harmonic morphism, then (7) m-l>k(n-l). Suppose that <P restricts to a map 0 : Sm -* S" ; then by a theorem of R. Wood ([W,p.163]), (8) m < 2«. Combining (7) and (8), we obtain 2n - I > m - I > k(n - I). Therefore, k = 2 and m = 2« - 1. The same reasoning as in the proof of Theorem 1 completes the proof. 5. Remarks on general harmonic morphisms between spheres (1) Let n : S3 -►S2 be the standard Hopf fibration and 0, : S2 -» S2 a holomorphic map of degree r > 2. Then, nr = 6r o n : S3 —>S2 is a harmonic morphism with critical points. It is certainly not a Hopf fibration. However, the classification theorem of [BW] shows that all harmonic morphisms </>: S3 -» S2 are of the form </>= 6 or] for a suitable holomorphic (anti-holomorphic) map. (2) In the context of topology, if <f>: Sm -> S" is a locally trivial fibration with m > « > 2, then m —2« -1 and « = 2,4,8. The fibre model F has the homotopy type of Sn~x . For « = 4,8, there are many such smooth fibrations [EK].